In one of the most popular of Europe’s recent art events, the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris hosted, between 9 October 2013 and 13 January 2014, the exhibition ‘Frida Kahlo/Diego Rivera – L’art en fusion’, dedicated to the two best-known Mexican plastic artists of the 20th century. This exhibition (earlier announced on this blog – see entry for 28 September 2013) proved a major success, giving rise to crowds snaking around the museum, located in the famous Jardin des Tuileries within view of the Eiffel Tower and best-known as home to Claude Monet’s celebrated ‘Les Nymphéas’ (‘The Waterlilies’).

As is well known, the relationship between Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) and Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was not just artistic but also personal: they lived out a tempestuous love story, marrying in 1929, divorcing in 1939 and remarrying a year later. If Diego fulfilled the ‘traditional male expectations’ with numerous extramarital affairs, Frida too had her lovers, including among others León Trotsky and the Mexican diva Chavela Vargas. Theirs was a human drama coloured by the precarious health of Frida, a victim twice over: of polio as a child and of a traffic accident at the age of 18 which left her semi-paralysed (she painted from her bed).

Nonetheless, it is rare to find the two artists’ work exhibited side by side, and the great challenge of this event was, precisely, to place their artistic production in a (problematic) dialogue. The fact is that, for all the closeness of their relationship, in their painterly practice Frida and Diego were very, very different. Diego is best known for his enormous murals (represented in the exhibition by reproductions), which adorn some of Mexico’s most important public buildings, and for his political and social themes; Frida’s work, by contrast, is intimate in nature, centred on the portrait and self-portrait, her bodily sensations and the emotional turmoil arising from the relationship.

The exhibition was meticulously organised, with the participation of representatives of the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City, which supplied many of the exhibits. The chosen option was not to mix up the two artists’ works indiscriminately, but, rather, to present them in separate ‘blocks’, dedicated to one or the other and occupying whole rooms or walls. In an exemplary gesture, the explicatory boards offered commentary in three languages (English, French and Spanish). The paintings were complemented by a full selection of biographical and photographic material relating to both, and by a final section devoted to ‘Fridamania’, or the posthumous cult of Frida. A comprehensive catalogue assembled the works from the exhibition and more, with articles by specialists.

In many aspects, the contrast between Rivera’s ‘public’ works and the ‘private’ art of Kahlo appears so extreme that, if one also recalls their rarely peaceful personal life, it might be tempting to prioritise the notion of rivalry and ask whether one or the other emerges the ‘victor’ from this meeting of titans of art. Should that be the case, it could prove difficult not to opt for Frida, and in this connection it is significant that she, not Diego, is the subject of the official exhibition poster: the catalogue, too, features Frida on the front and Diego only on the back.

There is, of course, a powerful Mexican presence in the work of both, from the arum lilies (alcatraces) evoked by Diego to the motif in Frida of traditional Mexican dress. At the same time, one cannot deny a certain European influence in the sensibility of both: Frida’s father was German, and Diego spent formative years in Europe. However, the works in the exhibition from Diego’s (little-known) earlier phase bear the imprint of European genres, from Fauvism to cubism, and however Mexican the themes of his murals, one may divine a certain ideological influence of Soviet socialist realism. If originality is the quality most to be sought in an artist, preference is likely to incline towards the work of Frida, with its female self-interrogation, its integration of the natural world (in the repeated presence of animals such as dogs or monkeys), and the presence of a theme then as rarely evoked artistically as illness.

In the end, should we speak – as the exhibition’s title suggests – of an artistic ‘fusion’, or is it more a matter of a perpetual aesthetic conflict? If the balance inclines to Frida’s side, Diego’s major talent cannot be denied. It may be legitimate to take away from this exhibition a concept of the relation between man and woman which was more than prophetic for its time and anticipated the terrain of today’s and tomorrow’s interaction between the sexes – thus pointing towards a twenty-first century marked by the ever-growing and iconic fame of the extraordinary artist called Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo de Calderón – or, simply, Frida.